Play The Game - Done vs. Finished

Look, I play video games.  I don't play lots of them, but I do play them alot, and sometimes I can even be arsed enough to blog about the experience.  This is one such time.

When playing a game, when is it done vs. when is it finished?  Put a better way, when are you done with a game vs. when are you finished with it?

I asked myself this question the other day after getting to 98.8% Completion on Lego: Batman, and then getting frustrated with the next to last level.  I was trying to collect all one hundred 10K studs hidden in the Wayne Manor, but was short the last one.  After nearly an hour of frustration I finally turned off my Wii and went to do something else.

Only to turn my Wii back on ten minutes later to try again.  

Thus, twenty minutes later I had finally completed my first game in...well, Lego: Batman is possibly the first game I've 100% Completed since the advent of bonus content.  Castlevania:SoTN doesn't count, because while I did get the 100.2% map completion, I never did manage to get all the weapons and items.  I certainly never got 100% on Kingdom Hearts, FFX, Drake's Fortune, Metroid Prime, Psychonauts, Metal Arms, or any of the other games I've played on 32-bit systems and higher.

However, I beat all those games and consider my time with them to be finished.  That when the credits rolled I feel as though I had gotten a full and satisfying experience from my time with the game.

Then there are the games that I am done with, but never actually beat.

Final Fantasy X-2.  God of War II.  Pokemon Pearl.  Final Fantasy VII.  Final Fantasy VIII.  Final Fantasy XII.  And others that slip my sieve-like memory at the moment.  These are all games that gave me the opposite feeling when I played them.  With FFX-2 and FFXII, it was a feeling of apathy that killed the game for me.  When given the choice of playing those games, or staring at a wall, wall-staring won hands down.  With FFVII, it was a growing sense of annoyance that did me in.  I had gotten to the end game, but a growing realization that I didn't really care for Cloud, Tifa, and the rest of the emo-crusaders made me put the game on the shelf and forget about it.  

Pokemon Pearl is an odd one, because while I completed the story mode, I gave up long before becoming a true Pokemon master.  Blame boredom for that one.  The prospect of grinding for another sixty hours to collect all those little freaks, and make the Sinnoh region my bitch really didn't appeal to me.  That, and I got Lock's Quest in the mail.  Now that is a fantastic game!

As for God of War II, well, you can read all about my problems with that game in the link above.  For the lazy, the short version is that Kratos is a dick, and I hope he suffers for eternity.

So, what are some of yours?*

*Question is almost entirely rhetorical since almost no one reads this.

Comments

[cheap ffxi gil]

Well, there are may types of games. Nowadays it's online vs consoles. Based on my experience, console games can easily be stopped since they have their own endings compared to online games where it's up to the player when to stop. As for me, I dunno when I'll stop playing FFXI since my friends are all playing it.

[David Brady]

Fascinating--I was not Done playing Lego: Star Wars on the Wii until I had played it through to absolute 100% completion twice. But I played Lego: Batman for about 2 hours and then gave up when I realized it just wasn't going "start getting fun"--what I was getting from the game was what the game had to offer, and it just failed utterly to hook my "Gamer OCD".

For me, games hook me with a Story, which is probably why I love L:SW and not L:B or L:IJ. Star Wars is very faithful to the story while the Batman and Indiana Jones games both take extensive liberties with their respective plotlines.

I've had Gamer OCD since I was a kid (I once played a single game of Asteroids on my Atari for 16 hours straight) but I didn't recognize the behavior until I played Spyro the Dragon as an adult. Spyro I, II and III were all games where I had to get every gem, rescue every dragon, beat every bonus level, and collect absolutely all of everything, everywhere, before I would let myself be finished. Every couple of years I will put in one of the discs, and before I know it I have played all three games to 100% all over again. To this day I will occasionally tell people "I have to go home now, there is Unfinished Spyro in my house." :-)

I have finished the Spyro games between 3 and 6 times *each*.

...but honestly? I'm still not sure I'm Done.